Chapter 25: No Light Beneath the Door

The board of tenancy opened its correspondence at nine, and at nine-fifteen Sable walked in with a manila folder under her arm and the flat's lease agreement inside it, and she did not leave until the matter was resolved. She told Vera this afterward, standing in the kitchen with her coat still on, and Vera said only that she had known she would not.

What Callum did with those three hours was sleep.

Not the counted sleep, the metabolic maintenance he had been performing for forty-one months — the horizontal vigilance he called rest. He sat in his chair and closed his eyes and went under properly, without scheduling it, without the cocktail's chemical hand on his shoulder guiding him down. He was simply tired in a way that had been waiting a long time for the appropriate occasion, and the appropriate occasion had apparently arrived while he was not looking. His hands stayed flat on the table. His pulse, had he been monitoring it, would have read sixty-two and held there, unambitious, the pulse of a man with nowhere particularly urgent to be.